Auburn MBA student Casey Mikula one of 14 people to place preseason bets on Auburn to win the national championship, will get $10,000 when Auburn beats FSU

Two bits, four bits, ten thousand dollars—all for Auburn, stand up and holler. Casey Mikula and his golden ticket. [Photo: Joe McAdory]Auburn MBA student and earthquake survivor Casey Mikula was at the Iron Bowl, as happy as anyone, but maybe a bit more bummed than most that Michigan didn’t knock off Ohio State.

“I called my dad and said, ‘it looks like we’re probably not going to make it because (No. 2) Ohio State beat Michigan by one point (42-41)’ and you’re thinking ‘that was the chance and Ohio State’s chance to get beaten had been lost,’ Mikula told Joe McAdory, communications editor for the Raymond J. Harbert College of Business, for a story you should read. “Then I looked back on it and said, ‘wait a minute. Auburn was 1,000-to-1 coming into the season. All of these improbable things have happened.’ It almost seems like it should happen. It’s almost been like a movie, the whole season: The catch and the return.”

Even that part where you place an impossible $10 bet on Auburn winning the BCS title game on a whim just to be able to take a picture of yourself and the slip to send to your friends for some LOLs but it maybe just maybe…

Yep, you know that betting slip you saw on Twitter from a dude—turns out he’s a 1998 Auburn grad named Mark Skiba—who picked Auburn to win the national championship back in January or something? Well, turns out, he wasn’t the only one who believed from the beginning. Mikula has a golden ticket, too.

And actually, Mikula’s wager was even bigger, right? At least in terms of the odds offered? Skiba’s bet was $100 for Auburn to win with 500-to-1 odds? Mikuba’s was a $10 gamble with 1,000-to-1 odds.

He’s one of 14 Auburn fans and/or prophets that put their actual money where their mouths in their dreams were in the preseason. But he’s probably the only one currently getting their master’s in business analytics, which as Mikula says, is “key to everything in Las Vegas.”

Mikula graduates Saturday. By the time he starts his career as an implementation consultant for a Madison, Wisc.-based electronic health records company in February, he’ll almost certainly be $10,000 richer.

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